HIVE INSTALLATION!

April 10th finally arrived.  After four months of selecting my bee breeder, assembling and painting the hives, gathering tools, designing my honey label, reading a lot of bee books, and finding a swanky, high tech bee suit to go with my wasabi colored wellies, my bees arrived in Austin for an early Sunday morning pickup.  I ordered the bees from BeeWeavers, a 5th generation family bee business, headquartered out of Navasota, Texas.  They have a great track record of producing mellow bees that are resistant to many apiary diseases and parasites.  They also haven't used any chemicals on their girls for well over 10 years.  Since my hive is going to be completely organic, the BeeWeaver bee breed fit the bill.  (Try saying that 3 times quickly).

My girls had been trucked in the night before, and I was at the designated pick up house promptly at 7:30am.  It was VERY surreal to see 300+ bee boxes scattered throughout the yard all buzzing loudly.  As you can imagine, many bees had escaped from their boxes so the air was teeming with honey bees drunkenly bumping into everyone picking up their new colonies.  It was a good, last minute call on my part to use my son's Mazda SUV for the pickup - instead of my Mini Cooper - because I had a dozen or so escapees zooming around the interior of the car during the drive home.  Fortunately, they really liked the hatchback window and not the front windshield.

I decided to buy nucs for my hives instead of package bees because every experienced beekeeper I spoke with (they call themselves beeks) said I'd have greater success at keeping the hive alive with a nuc than with package bees.

Nuc stands for nucleus hive and it differs from package bees in a significant way.  Nucs are boxes that contain 4 hive frames, about 10,000 bees, and an established queen that have been working together for a few weeks.  There is already brood (babies), pollen, and honey in the frames - so you more or less start with a reduced, yet fully working hive.  This is how a nuc arrives:

Packaged bees, on the other hand, consist of an unestablished queen (ensconced with her attendants in her own screened queen box) nestled within a larger screened box containing 3 pounds of bees.  Believe me - there are a LOT of bees in a 3 pound box.  During shipping, the packaged bees get used to the queen through their respective screened cages - heavy pheromones are at work during these early days.  Only when the package bees are shaken into their new hive are the workers able to release the queen by chewing through a candy door.  Once freed, the new team can begin filling up the frames from scratch.  This is what three pounds of package bees looks like - guess where the queen is?  Where is Waldo comes to mind.

Installation of a nuc is easy.  You just put the four frames in the hive along with empty frames to fill out the rest of the hive box (called a brood box), pop the top feeder on that, fill it with sugar water, install the cover, and WALAH - the installation is done.  All went without a hitch - and I was lucky to actually see the queen bee as I installed both hives.  I opted for marked queens when I placed my order thinking that it would make hive inspections much easier.  Queens are marked with a dab of paint on their backs.  It stays on her for her entire life.  Color coding is used to designate the year she was mated and installed.  For example, queens installed in 2011 (and any other year ending in 1 or 6) are marked in white like this:

I have pictures of me installing the hives (thanks to photographer Tom!), but I haven't been able to find my USB cable to connect my camera to my computer, so can't yet post the pictures.  Have no fear - I've ordered a new one.  Hopefully it shows up in my mailbox today!